How to understand mental actions

Abstract

There are lots of goings-on in our mental lives: thinking of something, calculating the sum of two numbers, daydreaming, deciding what to do, or trying to remember a particular moment. Some of these are actions we do intentionally while others are things that just happen to us. Thus, philosophers of action take different stands about the scope of mental agency. In this thesis, I argue that there is an implicit metaphysical assumption in discussions about the scope of mental agency, which is somewhat due to Strawson’s (2003) influential account. Roughly put, the assumption is that for a mental act A, A-ing occurs only after certain processes, which might (not) be agential, that lead up to an event of A-ing. I argue that this conceptualization leads many philosophers to argue that most mental activities cannot be agential. However, I think that this is metaphysically inaccurate. The objective of this thesis is to show how and why this is the case by focusing on a particular mental action: deciding. Inspired by the Vendler-Kenny typology of verbs, I argue that deciding can be considered as an accomplishment and that the occurrence of the decision is not a distinct effect, but a result of deliberative processes: deciding is nothing over and above deliberative processes, but just these processes’ coming to an end. I believe that this approach will be effective in solving problems an account of mental agency can face.